Under the Surface: an inside look at how Microsoft’s tablet came to be

Panos Panay, general manager of the team behind the Microsoft Surface, touches an old mockup made of black and white plastic. He’s forgetting glue, certainly – two panels appear to have been hot-glued to form the “tablet” part of the device — but tape and strings really are two key ingredients in this prototype, the one Panay’s team used to show off what Surface would look like. It’s crude and fragile, but it’s also unmistakably Surface.

At a private event held for a small group of press this week at Microsoft’s sprawling campus in Redmond, Washington, we got to see that and dozens of other prototypes of what would become Microsoft’s first tablet, the $499 device leading the company’s charge toward Windows 8. Panay and Steven Sinofsky, President of Windows, were our tour guides for the day as we saw how the software giant built the hardware designed to “extend Windows into the physical realm.”